Boris Trakhtenbrot

A lecture on his thesis results in Penza brought a charge of idealism in the Stalin era; his institute cleared him on 31 January 1952.

After earning his doctorate he took a post at the Belinski Pedagogical Institute in Penza in December 1950. That year Stalin published essays on linguistics, and academics began checking one another's work for conformity with Communist thinking. The foundations of mathematics were already a sensitive area. When Trakhtenbrot lectured on results from his thesis, in a talk titled The Method of Symbolic Calculi in Mathematics, he was denounced as an idealist of the Carnapian variety. Colleagues complained that he stayed neutral in the dispute between materialism and idealism and did not criticize bourgeois logicians such as Russell and Tarski. Leading mathematicians including Novikov and Lyapunov defended him. On 31 January 1952 the institute's management and party organization concluded that his work contained no idealism. The affair cost him heavily: he wrote that his health was undermined, that for about two years he could not do research, and he published only one paper between 1950 and 1955.